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These Are the Best Books of June

Just in time for your summer vacation: extreme tourism resorts, scary-ass monsters, and something called the Girlfriend Experiment.

The Reef

Juan Villoro

Tony is a washed-up rock star who thinks fondly of touring in Tokyo. Years of that life have left him with a partially severed finger (a firecracker), a limp (a car), and memory loss (a lot of drugs). Now he works at a Caribbean resort called the Pyramid, a place that exists “so you can leave your former life behind”—guests and employees included—running the sound system for the hotel’s aquarium. Oh, and here’s the wrinkle: the Pyramid specializes in “extreme tourism,” which means patrons can sign up for faux kidnappings and the “authentic” experience of life under threat of cartel violence “Fear is our greatest natural resource,” Tony says, set against a shrinking coastline.

Mexican author Juan Villoro is playfully cynical, and in The Reef, tourism makes for an easy window into geopolitical satire. “Every species has their own cure for despair,” Villoro writes. “Horses stampede through canyons, whales wash up on beaches. Human beings just pack their bags. In the future there won’t be any wars. There’ll be tourists—exhausted invaders.” Everyone at the Pyramid is wasting away beneath the sun.

The story picks up when the death of the resort’s scuba diving instructor is revealed to be a murder. But The Reef is a mystery as much as, say, Inherent Vice is one: clumsily plotted, but the plotting is really beside the point. Tony stumbles his way to the book’s conclusion, through a noir-tinged voyage that finds him moving through escalating absurdities of characters and scenarios. Tragedy in paradise turns out to be a metaphor for the greater world.

The Changeling

Victor LaValle

A lot of people have credited Jordan Peele for fusing the horror genre and racial consciousness in his movie Get Out, but Victor LaValle has been doing this in his novels for years. In The Changeling, LaValle upends the age-old changeling story. At the center of the book are Apollo and Emma, a young couple that falls in love, gets married, and has a kid. A few chapters later, Apollo finds himself tied up, unable to do anything as he hears the sound of his young son Brian being murdered by Emma, who disappears thereafter. Apollo sets out to find her for answers—a windy journey that takes him through horrors both figurative and literal.

LaValle's career has been inching toward the horror genre since his third book, the excellent Big Machine. He followed it with the underrated psych-ward haunting The Devil in Silver, and later, the H.P. Lovecraftian The Ballad of Black Tom. But unlike Black Tom, which at times could feel more like Lovecraft homage than brainy inversion, Changeling takes the less obvious route in its socially conscious horror. (It’s a bit more Rosemary’s Baby than Get Out.) Still, LaValle’s gift is a voice that sounds both fable-like and contemporary at once, a kind of timelessness that never feels at odds with the myriad references to modern technology (even if it at times it’s a tad overstuffed with a warning about posting too much information on Facebook). The Changeling is full of other specifics too, in particular a thorough traversing of New York’s boroughs. But more than anything—as a novel of the terrors of child-rearing, racism, the unknown—it is really goddamn scary.

The Answers

Catherine Lacey

The Answers starts with a 30-year-old woman named Mary, who is so desperate to soothe a number of physical pains that she’s willing to try something called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia. Wait, it gets weirder. To pay for her treatment, Mary finds a job with the Girlfriend Experiment, a pseudo-scientific, pseudo-performative test to see if every facet of a relationship can be perfected if they are singled out and specialized. That means the subject, famous actor Kurt Sky, has small harem of girlfriends: an Intellectual Girlfriend for conversation, a Maternal Girlfriend for nurturing, and an Anger Girlfriend for arguments. Mary gets the role of Emotional Girlfriend, which mostly involves listening to Kurt, and the occasional “I love you.” (Physical closeness will be handled by a separate Intimacy Team.)

Catherine Lacey has constructed an incredibly clever conceit to explore the landscape of human relationships, especially as things become more tangled and complicated. The Girlfriend Experiment being an experiment, there are researchers attempting to quantify results. “Feelings are just data, not mysterious, not immeasurable,” one says. But of course, he’s wrong. Earlier in the book, Mary says, “People think you need them but you don’t.” She’s wrong too, especially as Kurt’s feelings for her expand past the realm of the Emotional.

There’s a bit of a twist at the end, one that leaves Mary reflecting on human connection at large: “I thought of all those billions of hearts beating out there, trying to find love or keep love going. All those people, getting in the way of each other—how do we even stand it? How do we make our way around?” In a sleight of irony, Lacey’s written a book called The Answers that’s really about the questions.

Uncomfortably Happily

Yeon-Sik Hong

In the manga memoir Uncomfortably Happily, a young couple moves from Seoul to the countryside, partly to escape the manic trappings of city life, but mostly to save money. They get a run-down house and vow to fix it up, grow vegetables, and make ends meet. But the husband and wife—both cartoonists—struggle to stay above water. Uncomfortably Happily is the rare tale about poverty that feels honest. It’s not about being destitute; it’s about the constant, unending anxiety of barely having enough for groceries and paying bills on time. In a way, it’s an ever-present but banal fear the pervades their lives.

These worries are brilliantly illustrated in black and white, which veers from minimal slices of everyday life to more intricate, elaborate flights of fancy to depict the husband’s angst and existential self-pity. But for the most part, the book is full of levity. Maybe even more unusual than a good portrayal of being poor is one of being in a marriage that’s simply healthy. Uncomfortably Happily’s couple often argues about how to prioritize the little money they have, but there’s always an understanding that both are doing their best. And even through the winter, in their small briquette-fueled home, there is a simplicity and peacefulness in watching two people just try to make it work.